Cognitive Pearl #011 Kislev 17, 5775 9/12/14

A person.

BOOM!!!

Trauma.

There are all sorts of people and all sorts of booms. And that’s why there are many kinds of traumas. And despite the fact that various professional organizations and interest groups want to define (and exclude or include for their individual agendas) what is a traumatic event, what the consequences are, and what the consequences of the consequences are, it is possible to suggest a consensus: a traumatizing event is an event that wholly or partially sets off a cascade that immobilizes the victim or observer to the extent that he or she cannot return to their previous emotional, social, moral, intra-psychic, physiological, or spiritual state. At present, the scientific literature and research emphasizes the physiological disruption dimension of trauma. This justified emphasis and the excitement over the various somatic treatments (whose names and abbreviations are too many to list) it seems that we’ve forgotten (just a tad, perhaps) that trauma can be a massive multi-dimensional disruption.